In the great quilted cento that is Moby-Dick, there is a passage which might be interpreted as Melville’s response to James Barry’s 1776 engraving The Phoenix or the Resurrection of Freedom. In the engraving Andrew Marvell is depicted with Milton, Locke and Algernon Sidney among the mourners at the bier of Britain’s traditional liberties. Across a pond the mourners can see a Neoclassical rotunda with an eagle-like phoenix raising its strong wings. Below the cupola the words LIBERT. AMERIC. are inscribed. It is a potent, and in England, where the Cork-born artist engraved it, a rare republican icon that celebrates the transplantation of radical English political ideology to the American shore. The engraving is reproduced on the dust-jacket of Marvell and Liberty, a collection of essays which, like David Norbrook’s recent Writing the English Republic, chimes with the discontent that a significant percentage of British people now feels about the monarchy.

That sense of friendship, of a shared and living republican culture, is present in Melville’s many allusions to Milton, as well as in these intriguing paragraphs which open Chapter 58, ‘Brit’:

Steering north-eastward from the Crozetts, we fell in with vast meadows of brit, the minute, yellow substance, upon which the Right Whale largely feeds. For leagues and leagues it undulated round us, so that we seemed to be sailing through boundless fields of ripe and golden wheat.

On the second day, numbers of Right Whales were seen, who, secure from the attack of a Sperm Whaler like the Pequod, with open jaws sluggishly swam through the brit, which, adhering to the fringing fibres of that wondrous Venetian blind in their mouths, was in that manner separated from the water that escaped at the lip. As morning mowers, who side by side slowly and seethingly advance their scythes through the long wet grass of marshy meads; even so these monsters swam, making a strange, grassy, cutting sound; and leaving behind them endless swaths of blue upon the yellow sea.

Melville is alive to the future dangers which face the new republic, and he airs his anxiety by building these lines from Marvell into his prose:

For when the sun the grass hath vexed,The tawny mowers enter next;Who seem like Israelites to be,Walking on foot in a green sea.To them the grassy deeps divide,And crowd a lane to either side.

You can’t make an omelette, Marvell may be hinting, without breaking eggs, though on the other hand – and there’s usually another sleight of hand with him – he may be ironising the English revolutionaries when he shows how the mower

The edge all bloody from its breastHe draws, and does his stroke detest,Fearing the flesh untimely mowedTo him as black a fate forebode.

Melville knew Marvell’s work: in his Republican novella Billy Budd, he picks up the phrase ‘starry vere’ from ‘Upon Appleton House’. In these twinned republican imaginations, Leviathan, the state as whale, as monster of the deep, or the state as squad of bronzed soldiers, advances with a ‘strange, grassy, cutting’ or ‘whistling’ sound. And sound, the sonic resonance of action, event and metrical language, is one of Marvell’s subjects in his phantasmagoric poem. His ear is attuned to what Mandelstam called ‘the noise of time’, and this means that readers must seek the political and the historical in the delicate acoustic texture of his work. Not only does he foreground sound as a subject in ‘Upon Appleton House’, he builds very subtle effects into the web of his language, employing a principle of spreading or kinetic assonance. Where Melville predicts the rise of the US as a sinister maritime republic with an all-powerful navy (Ahab is a fighting Quaker like Richard Nixon), Marvell hints at what the future may hold for a Commonwealth that has no institutional continuity. The theme of wounded male narcissism – the mower on a hot day mown, self-injured – may be one way of giving imaginative shape to what it feels like to live inside a new political bubble that’s stretched to bursting point. But let us first address what is known about the life of That Most Excellent Citizen and Uncorrupted Member of Parliament, as his first biographer Edward Thompson described him in 1776, the year of James Barry’s engraving.

Andrew Marvell, whose father was an Anglican clergyman, was born in the East Riding of Yorkshire in 1621, and entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1633 at the age of 12. He left Cambridge in 1641 without obtaining his MA, and soon left for the Continent, where he appears to have acted as tutor to a wealthy young man. (On the other hand he may have entered his brother-in-law Edmund Popple’s trading-house.) When he returned to England in 1647 his political sympathies were apparently royalist. Though he was soon to change his views, the best readings of his poetry are sensitive, as Nicholas Murray points out, to the ‘strangeness of his genius’, and avoid tidy ideological categories. We need to attend to the ‘uncanny tremor of implication’ that makes the lucid surfaces of his poems ‘shimmer with a sense of something undefined and undefinable beneath them’. This is apparent in the poems he wrote while living on Thomas, Lord Fairfax’s estate in Yorkshire, where he was appointed tutor to Fairfax’s daughter Mary some time after Fairfax resigned as Commander-in-Chief – or Lord General – of the Parliamentary forces. Fairfax resigned because he did not want to take military action against the Scots; he had also been opposed to the execution of Charles. Though Fairfax’s outlook and his Horatian retirement from public life are reflected subtly in the poems, Marvell came to admire Cromwell in the years from 1653 to Cromwell’s death in 1658 – he was the de facto laureate to the new state. He also became tutor to William Dutton, who was a member of Cromwell’s household.

At this time Marvell was referred to as ‘a notable English-Italo-Machiavellian’ – for reasons that are mysterious he had the reputation of being a crafty and powerful figure. In 1657 he entered the public service as assistant to his friend Milton, who was Secretary of Foreign or Latin Tongues. He was now at the heart of the English Government and a frequent visitor to Milton’s house in Petty France. He first became one of the two MPs for Hull in 1659 and was reelected in May 1660, a month after Charles II’s triumphal return to London. He remained an MP until his death in 1678, and during his long Parliamentary career was appointed to 120 committees, acted as teller in 8 divisions and made 14 speeches – a ‘diligent enough’ record, Murray says, for his day. He enjoyed political activity and lobbying, but was a bad speaker, a reserved, cautious, taciturn man who, John Aubrey noted, ‘had not a generall acquaintance’. He lived in meagre lodgings in central London, and appears to have had a close friendship with Prince Rupert which, according to an early Marvell editor, Thomas Cooke, meant that when it was unsafe for him to have it known where he lived ‘for fear of losing his life by treachery, which was often the case, his royal friend would frequently renew his visits in the habit of a private person’.

Letters

In his far-ranging comments on Marvell, Tom Paulin (LRB, 25 November) might have found room for William Blake – a successor who might be granted rival celebrity as a political poet. You could see a direct response to ‘Appleton House’ when Blake wrote in his Notebook:

I went to the garden of love, And I saw what I never had seen, A chapel was built in the midst Where I used to play on the green. And the gates of this chapel were shut, And Thou shalt not writ over the door; So I turned to the garden of love That so many sweet flowers bore, And I saw it was filled with graves, And tomb-stones where flowers should be - And priests in black gounds were walking their rounds, And binding with briars my joys and desires.

‘Gounds’, incidentally, was in common – vulgar – usage in the 18th and early 19th centuries: Cockney pronunciation made it a true rhyme with ‘rounds’.

At several places in his close reading of Andrew Marvell’s poetry (LRB, 25 November 1999) Tom Paulin opts (as he admits) for an over-simple formalism and creates meanings which in some cases seem clearly at odds with a straight, full reading of the text. Thus when he describes the comic metempsychosis of verse 7 of ‘The Garden’, he skips a stanza so as to yoke to verse 7 the closing couplet of verse 8:

Two paradises twere in one To live in Paradise alone

He then ventures that Marvell is ‘masking’ a ‘dangerous pantheism’ – dangerous to whom? – ‘behind Christian piety and a jokey light-verse tone’. This is hardly likely: if one reads the whole of verse 8, the couplet can be seen as an aphoristic conclusion to a conventional account of Adam’s solitary, unfallen state. The two paradises are the external, tangible Garden of Eden and the internal garden as Adam sees and interprets it. Cartesian maybe, but nothing to do with pantheism.

The problem with the way Paulin sees Marvell is that because Marvell was a friend of Milton, a supporter of the Republic and a wonderful poet, Paulin wants to include him in a sacred canon of Nonconformist, left-libertarian English writers. However, he neglects to point out that Marvell’s three long verse tributes to Cromwell – the ‘Horatian Ode’, ‘The First Anniversary’ and ‘Upon the Death of His Late Highness the Lord Protector’ – amount to a remarkable triptych of political sycophancy. I cannot see how Paulin can take a passage like

Thou in a pitch how far beyond the sphere Of human glory tower’st and reigning there Despoiled of mortal robes, in seas of bliss, Plunging does bathe, and tread the bright abyss

and argue that this is a metaphor for the ‘chaotic void at the heart of political action which turns the world upside down’. When the passage is read in full, it is immediately recognisable as Marvell’s own version of the vulgar apotheosis of absolute monarchy. It is reminiscent of the ceiling of the Banqueting Hall in Whitehall Palace, commissioned by Charles I and painted in the 1630s by Rubens, in which the father of the king whom Cromwell later had executed is portrayed soaring through the firmament surrounded by bouncing cherubs.

Marvell’s public poetry reveals a politician who hedged his bets and backed different parties at different times. Paulin concedes that in his youth, Marvell was a Royalist. He converted briefly to Roman Catholicism between 1639 and 1640, and ‘Flecknoe’ (c.1645), though a satire, is an affectionate one. However, once radical Protestantism won the war, Marvell didn’t, unlike Winstanley, defend the rights of Catholics to religious freedom within the Republic. Instead, he spouted the usual propaganda, and addressed the first and perhaps only case of English-managed genocide with the merry couplet: ‘And now the Irish are ashamed/To see themselves in one year tamed.’

The common thread running through the political poems is not Marvell’s prototypical love of democracy or freedom of belief and conscience, but the glorification of military conquest and subjugation. We are treated to a series of portraits of Cromwell confronting destiny, forging with fire and sword sublime order out of grubby chaos, and taming the Irish, the Scots, the Jews, the French, the Whore of Babylon and all the rest of the rabble. In ‘The First Anniversary’ Marvell devotes 60 lines to a story of how the sins of his subjects caused Cromwell to crash his chariot in Hyde Park with near-fatal consequences; but somehow the demigod managed to resurrect himself and carry on ministering to his people for a good few years. Perhaps Marvell was only pursuing the conventions of the time, but if the whole point of Cromwell was his self-effacing humanitarianism, as Christopher Hill and others have made out, I hope he was suitably embarrassed by the tedious excesses of his laureate.

While I agree with Paul Mountain (Letters, 6 January) that Marvell was to a sometimes worrying extent ‘a politician who hedged his bets’, the first of his three Cromwellian poems, the ‘Horatian Ode’, cannot be dismissed quite so easily as ‘political sycophancy’. But at least this argument concentrates on the politics of the ‘Ode’ and its historical moment – the immediate aftermath of Cromwell’s genocidal excursion to Ireland. What makes the ‘Ode’ so much more satisfying than the later two Cromwell poems is precisely the way in which it shows the pros and cons of granting admiration to the political strongman. Its greatness as a political poem lies in the way it deals with issues of power, political morality and leadership, which are treated in a fashion far too robust for today’s Common Room radicals. Marvell’s anti-Catholic bigotry, his political mobility, his celebration of the crushing of political dissent (the ‘accursed locusts’ of ‘The First Anniversary’) are inconvenient warts on the republican portrait, but they do not invalidate the force of this poem.